November | 2012 | There's a Book for That

We were so pleased to welcome our long time BLG reader, Bill back on Halloween day! He bravely sat amongst the dragons, dinosaurs, witches and other creatures and read us the very entertaining book The Monsters’ Monster by Patrick McDonnell.

The main characters of this story are wanna be monsters who celebrate crashing and bashing, huffing and puffing and the shouting of the word, “NO!” They spend endless days arguing over who is the biggest and baddest amongst them. I must admit I think they are all quite charming and adorable, but thank goodness they don’t know that. Students also did quite a bit of tittering at their antics. Finally, Grouch, Grump and little Gloom ‘n’ Doom decide that they will together make the most terrible of all monsters. They fashion him out of various things including tacks, staples, gauze, gunk and a smelly old shoe. And then they hoist this monster creation into the stormy sky where he gets hit by a lightning bolt!

Bill is a fantastic reader and on the lightening bolt page he used a dramatic pause followed by a surprising boom and crash. There were some jumpers in the audience. “I wasn’t scared,” announced the child that jumped the most. Of course not. 🙂

This monster, newly alive, is big and has a deep booming voice. He is everything these little “monsters” could ever have hoped for when they schemed him up. The only thing is that this big, bad monster is actually sweet, polite and charming. Instead of wanting to terrorize villagers, he wants to appreciate the fresh air and express his gratitude for life.

But even though, this big monster seems a disappointment to the little monsters three, he ends up offering them some positive inspiration. And . . . freshly baked jelly donuts.

McDonnell charms us all with this story and the children loved chatting about who their favourite monster actually was in the story. A book that will be read often and cherished in our library!

Student reviewer’s report:

Andrew: My favourite part is when the lightning hit the Monster and went BAM! The monster came alive. The monster will be bad? I wonder does the monster like light?

Kelvin: My favourite part was the hoist cause it looks awesome! They created a monster, it was a big monster. I will create my own monster. A vampire!

I love Halloween art but I don’t love that it looks outdated November 1st. When I saw these starlit pumpkins on the blog Deep Space Sparkle, I knew I had found the perfect art activity for the short lived Halloween season that could extend as a beautiful fall display.

This was a fun two day project. The highlights? The mixing of paint right on the page and the smudging of chalk pastel. The muckier one gets one’s hands, the better it seems to be!

I give full credit to the step by step instructions on Deep Space Sparkle for allowing my class to have such fun and such success with this project! Here are our step by step instructions with photographs.

Step 1: Draw pumpkins and leaves (using black oil pastel) on a large construction weight light coloured paper. Hint: draw an oval first and lines that extend from that. We had a “live” pumpkin in the room to examine for interesting stem shapes and textures and to feel the ridges.

Step 2: Students received brushes and paint colours (yellow, orange, blue) and created orange pumpkins and green leaves by mixing colours wet on wet while painting. Well, you can imagine how exciting it was to have yellow and red turn to orange and blue topped with yellow to transform into green. This was magic in the making!

Add some yellow paint . . .

Top it with red and blend into . . . orange!

Blue and yellow really do make green! And everyone got different shades 🙂

Step 3: On Day 2, cut out pumpkins and leaves and then glue to black paper.

Step 4: We handed each child a brown, green and white piece of chalk pastel. They started by colouring in the stems and adding white highlights to the pumpkin. Using the green, students drew vines and added highlights to their leaves.